Growing climate change challenges and increasingly strict sustainability standards have led to a significant growth in the need for building refurbishment projects which are essentially focused on retrofitting in order to make them low carbon, energy efficient and environmentally friendly. The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) suggested that Building Information Modelling (BIM) should be used to achieve sustainability requirements during refurbishment projects as a correspondence to the National Audit Office (NAO) sustainability report. BIM is now widely advocated as the preferred tool for the management and co-ordination of design and construction data using object-oriented principles. The successful integration of environmental assessment into BIM for the whole of the construction lifecycle has not yet been achieved. The potential for using BIM in refurbishment projects specifically for achieving and managing sustainability requirements has not been yet critically reviewed or put into practice. This paper focuses on the use of BIM sustainability design tools in refurbishment projects, to achieve energy efficient buildings and achieve sustainability criteria for refurbishing non-domestic buildings. A critical lens is cast on the current literature in the domains of sustainable designs and the associated implications of the sustainability decision-support tools in BIM. The research also reviews the practicality of the existing sustainability decisionsupport tools that are currently used to assist with achieving environmental scheme certifications such as BREEAM and LEED for refurbishment projects.

Purpose: Continuous manufacturing systems used within the steel industry involve different machines and processes which are arranged in a sequence of operations in order to manufacture the products. The steel industry is generally a capital-intensive industry and because of high capital investment, equipment utilization as effectively as possible is of high priority. This paper illustrates a new method, Overall Equipment Effectiveness-Market Based (OEE-MB) for the precise calculation of equipment effectiveness for full process cycle in order to respond to the steel market. Design/methodology/approach: A refinement of the existing concept of OEE is developed based on a new scheme for loss analysis within market time. The paper illustrates the concept with a case study based on compact strip manufacturing processes within the steel industry. Findings: While, the results for OEE by ignoring a considerable amount of possible hidden losses might be satisfying, the OEE-MB report shows potential room for improvement. It reflects changes in both internal and external market for the steel industry, and therefore provides a tool for not only monitoring but also managing improvement. Practical implications: OEE-MB provides a sound perspective on improvement of steel plants by taking into consideration all losses within market time for meeting both internal and external demands. Originality/value: OEE-MB monitors production and measures the equipment effectiveness for full process cycle in order to meet the market. It makes communication more efficient and easier within the steel industry and may be used as a benchmark to achieve world-class standard.

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The paper describes a computer program written to predict the effective service area of a transmitter in a v.h.f. mobile radio network. The computed results enable field-strength contours to be deduced, and hence provide more useful information than is possible by reference to standard statistical curves. The transmitter siting can be changed, and the field-strength contours recalculated, without the preparation of new geographical data. As a consequence, the efficiencies of a selection of possible transmitter sitings can be readily compared. The accuracy of the program is verified by comparing the computed results with field-strength measurements on a mobile radio installation operating at 86-2 MHz.